Educator Tool: Using Visual Mind Mapping to Manage Your Class Fundraising Drive

Whether it is to raise money for a class trip or to help construct the new school gymnasium, classroom fundraisers are a common activity for many teachers and students. Often, teachers offer incentives to students who raise the most money, and, many times, classrooms even complete against each other for these top seller prizes. It is, therefore, important that the teacher keeps careful track of how much students sell during the fundraising effort. Yet, organizing this list of who sold what and how much each student has earned can be tedious for teachers, especially when they must continue to keep up with their normal teaching duties. Visual Mind Mapping offers an easy way for teachers to track fundraising activities; with Mind Maps, teachers can organize student sales and earnings into one, easy to conceptualize diagram. In addition, teachers can make the Visual Mind Map fun and intuitive by adding colors, pictures, and other visuals. Thus, both the students and teachers can clearly see how well their fundraising drive is progressing, and track their progress in a creative way.

What are Visual Mind Maps and How Are They Created?

A Visual Mind Map is “a means of organizing information that allows individuals to create diagrams, pictures, and other graphic visuals in order to show the relationship between ideas or other types of information”. With a Visual Mind Map, the creator makes use of images and colors to construct the map and represent his or her ideas in a non-linear format. When creating a Visual Mind Map, the individual usually begins by showing the key concept or main idea of the information as a graphic image, located in the center of the map. Any themes surrounding the main idea are shown on “branches” that are attached to the central image. Subsequent themes of less importance are then attached to these branches using “child branches”, and so on. The resulting diagram is a “map” of the ideas and information presented that includes the images, visual graphics, and colors the individual associates with each of the themes and ideas.

Managing a Classroom Fundraiser Using a Visual Mind Map

A teacher and her students have decided to sell chocolates in order to raise money for a class trip. As a way of motivating her students, the teacher offers cash prizes in the amounts of $500, $250, and $100 to the top three sellers. She and her class decide to track class sales using a Visual Mind Map, so they begin constructing a map by representing their class fundraiser in the map’s center. Next, each student lists his or her name on a “branch”, colored in his or her favorite color, which is attached to the central image. The teacher then adds “child branches” to each “branch”, where she will record the number of boxes of chocolates the student sells and the amount of money he or she earns. Each week, the teacher updates the Visual Mind Map with the current sales numbers for each student and the total amount the class has earned. She also uses colors and pictures to make the map more intuitive and easy to understand. The attached Visual Mind Map shows what the class’ fundraising map might look like for any given week.

Keeping Track of the Fundraiser’s Progress

As the fundraiser progresses, both the teacher and her students can clearly see how well each student, as well as the class as a whole, is doing in reaching their target goal. Students are able stay motivated to earn the top selling prizes as they see how well they are doing against classmates on candy sales. The teacher, too, can remain motivated as she sees the money amount her class has earned increase from week to week. The Visual Mind Map has, therefore, made the fundraising process much simpler for the teacher and her class, and done so in a way that made tracking this process both motivating and fun.

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